LAUSR

Abstract Slow-fast analysis has been extensively used in the past to study the occurrence of bursting oscillations. Most bursting oscillations studies are performed on the low dimensional autonomous systems where only codimension-1 bifurcations take place at the transitions of quiescent and spiking states. However, in high dimensional slow-fast dynamical systems, there exist higher co-dimensional bifurcations, which may lead to much more complicated mechanisms for bursting oscillations. To reveal and understand the complicated phenomena, the present paper investigates the normal form of a four-dimensional cubic order system with parametric excitation as a slow parameter. Parametric frequency is chosen far less than the natural frequencies to make sure the coupling of fast and slow scales. In the absence of parametric excitation, the system has a double Hopf bifurcation at the origin. Several equilibrium branches and mechanisms of bursting oscillations are obtained for different amplitudes of the parametric excitation. The trajectory of the system is projected onto two independent sub-planes, while the movement of bursting oscillators is synthesized by the properties in each sub-plane. In the sub-plane, the mechanism of bursting oscillations is derived by employing the overlap of the transformed phase portrait and the equilibrium branches as well as the bifurcations. The codimension-2 double Hopf bifurcation may result in the occurrence of the bursting oscillations in four dimensions. When the excitation amplitude is relatively small, the trajectory only follows the equilibrium branches of trivial and single-mode solutions. With the increase of the excitation amplitude, the trajectory switches between the equilibrium branches of single-mode and mixed-mode. Furthermore, a few interesting phenomena are presented.